


A Little Familiar

by tawg



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Magic, Sitwell Week, jasper is a witch, pre AOS, pre MCU, turned into a cat, unintentional transmogrification
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-26
Packaged: 2018-02-18 05:47:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2337437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone makes mistakes, even SHIELD agents. But when you're a SHIELD agent who is also a witch, well... Some mistakes are a little more interesting than others.</p>
<p>(Or: Junior Agent Jasper Sitwell turns Agent Coulson into a cat.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [totalnerdatheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/totalnerdatheart/gifts).



The problem with SHIELD, Jasper thought to himself as he tried not to tremble under Agent Hill’s stern and frosty expression, was that people tended to overreact.

“Good news and bad news, huh?” Agent Hill said slowly, repeating Jasper’s opening phrase.

“Good news – I stopped the bleeding.” Some of the tension went out of Hill’s shoulders. Jasper wouldn’t go so far as to say that she sagged with relief, but there was slightly less ‘I can make your life full of difficulty and regret’ hanging in the air. “He should heal up fine,” Jasper continued. “He’s napping, I think.”

It was part of being a SHIELD agent, apparently. Getting shot at, okay, that one Jasper had accepted as ‘that thing that happens sometimes’. But also the other side of the scenario. Getting his door kicked in at four in the morning while people in tactical gear (who he could only hope were on his side) deposited a very still and very wet body in his bed. Jasper had still been in the bed at the time. It had brought back memories of college hazing, as if someone would snap a picture and the next SHIELD e-newsletter would open with a picture of Jasper in his periwinkle jammies and a dead body curled up beside him, accompanied with some caption about how fraternising with dead co-workers was still frowned upon, _thankyouverymuch_.

But no, it had been much simpler than that. An agent had been shot, a medic had done their best to patch him up, and someone had given the word that it would be really great if this person did not die. So he’d been brought to Jasper. Troublesome situations, though rarely of this severity, were often brought to Jasper. 

Jasper was a witch. It was not a quality that was considered desirable by many of the agents that he worked with, but people tended to reach a point where they found his talents useful. Which is how he ended up, at 7 am on a Thursday morning, in a set of bloodstained periwinkle blue pyjamas, trying to coax himself into giving Agent Hill the full story. Seeing his hesitation, Agent Hill raised one perfect eyebrow and gave him an expectant look. “And the bad news?”

Jasper raised a hand to nervously scratch at his ear, and then stopped at the last minute. There was still some blood on his fingers. And fur.

“I... kinda turned him into a cat.”

It had been a mostly-unintentional transfiguration. Jasper wasn’t the most skilled healing witch around, and working under pressure while having just been woken up was not an ideal situation for magic. Jasper had intended to reduce the amount of blood. And he had. By reducing the size of the patient. So, in a way, the spell had worked exactly as intended. And also it had been the complete opposite of what had been intended. Magic was a pain in the ass like that.

Hill’s second eyebrow raised up to join the first, turning a domineering expression of authority into one of surprise. “Cat,” she repeated.

“Cat,” Jasper confirmed. “But, I mean. It’ll cost a lot less to feed him like this. So really, that’s two bits of good news to just one of bad news.” Feeling emboldened, Jasper pressed on. “That’s twice as much good news as bad,” he said, giving her a lopsided grin. Magic had a way of encouraging people to look on the bright side.

Hill rolled her eyes, and added a soft snort for good measure. “Cat,” she said again, apparently to herself. “Can you make him human again?”

“Maybe?” Jasper hazarded. “Established morphic fields are pretty resilient,” he said, and got a blank stare for his efforts. “Most things tend to pop back to their original state,” he explained. “So he’ll probably go human again on his own, eventually.” Hill’s expression hardened a little, and Jasper hurried to add, “But I’ll certainly work on speeding it up. Probably there’s some way of fixing it. Probably this kind of thing happens all the time.”

Hill sighed though her nose, her mouth pulled down into an annoyed frown. It occurred to Jasper that she was the one who was going to have to explain this to her superiors. He felt a pang of sympathy for her. 

“Well, until he’s put all the way to rights,” Hill said briskly, “Agent Coulson is your responsibility.”

Jasper blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “Agent Coulson?” Jasper had never met Coulson in person, though he’d heard him over the comms. Coulson seemed to be one of those agents who disappeared for lengths of time to work on gods-know-what, and then got stuck working mission control while broken bones healed and fine motor skills returned. 

Jasper had a sudden fear that it was one of Coulson’s team napping in the middle of his bed, and Jasper would have to be the one to break the news to Coulson. He felt the blood drain out of his face. Maybe he’d have to fill the gap on Coulson’s team. Jasper wasn’t a fan of being shot at. Or heights. Or crossdressing. And a lot of the stuff Coulson worked on seemed to contain at least one of those things.

Agent Hill actually smiled a little at his fear. “That’s right,” she said, looking suddenly pleased with the situation. (Magic. Bright sides. It happened to everyone, eventually.) “Until you find a way to put him back to rights, Agent Coulson will remain in your care.” 

Jasper raised a hand, blood and fur and all, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Cat,” he said to himself. “I turned Agent Coulson into a cat.”

“Agent Catson,” Hill said helpfully. Then she chuckled to herself, and left Jasper alone to come to terms with the situation. He’d turned a badass level five agent into a cat. The cat was his responsibility until it returned to Agent Coulson-shape. Jasper was allergic to cats.

Magic. What a pain in the ass.


	2. Chapter 2

Jasper was given time away from the unit to work on the furry little problem that he had made. Which was both an upside and a downside to the situation. 

The truth was... When it came to intelligence and security and basically anything to do with people and convincing people to do what they were told? Witches were useful. And not just convincing people – animals, insects, fish. Plants, though they were tricky. The influence could be used to sway most living things if the witch had a knack for it. Jasper had heard about one witch who could charm bacteria. There were also things that were above his clearance level that he technically didn’t know about, but, well. There were plenty of situations where it was good to have someone with a witch’s talents on the scene.

That didn’t mean that witches were well-liked. 

A lot of people didn’t believe in witches, exactly. They knew someone who was perceptive, or strangely competent in some way. (A collection of ways, though one trait tended to be stronger than the others.) Usually it wasn’t an all-out talent, just a very strong knack for something. People who were out of the ordinary. Witchery was a genetic thing, as far as Jasper understood it. And like most natural talents it could be honed and specialised, or it could just hang around and eventually peter out into little more than a talking point at suburban barbeques. 

There was a formal component to it, too. Spellcraft. People who weren’t witches could do spells, and being a witch did not guarantee aptitude in that area. Jasper, for instance, wasn’t exactly gifted in spellcraft. As evidenced by the cat with a level five SHIELD clearance that was happily snoozing in a patch of sunlight. And Jasper wasn’t especially good at healing, either. He was very good at working out what was wrong. He’d just started working as a pathologist when someone had spotted him for what he was and an agent with a sleek haircut and a cute smile had shown up shortly after that.

Witches were recognised within SHIELD because SHIELD had basically been built on an organisation that opposed a certain branch of occultism. Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull, was possibly the most famous witch in modern memory. Some people thought that all witches had similar drives for power and destruction, others thought that Schmidt had been driven power-mad as a result of putting so much spellcraft upon himself. Jasper believed in a much more simple hypothesis – that Schmidt was a power-hungry racist who, like most power-hungry racists, thought that morals were deeply inconvenient things to have. There was nothing especially uncommon or unique about Schmidt in that regard. He was just more successful and way creepier to look at than the garden-variety power-hungry racist.

So, there was a little coolness within SHIELD towards witches. It wasn’t like Jasper had to wear a different coloured lanyard to mark him as a witch at all times. Probably most people outside of the teams he worked with didn’t know. It definitely wasn’t the worst environment he’d worked in.

For the most part he liked SHIELD. He was paid well and he didn’t have to know too much of any one thing. His job was a mix of problem solving and a ‘true or false’ game most of the time. A lot of the people he worked with were assholes, but that wasn’t unique to SHIELD. One of his few brushes with Agent Coulson had involved the other man shutting down some gentle hazing that had been directed at Jasper over the comms. Jasper had appreciated the gesture, then done his part and gotten the hell out of that little tangle. 

His present situation seemed to be harder to extract himself from. He couldn’t retreat to the safety of his apartment because his apartment was contaminated with freshly-felined catness, and he couldn’t seek refuge at work because he’d been put on specialised home duty until he found a way to put Coulson back to his prior form. Working on the situation was hampered by itchy eyes and the sniffles brought on by dried flakes of cat spit (and it didn’t help at all, knowing exactly which bit of the wider cat-system that he was allergic to. It just made the whole experience even more gross). He’d tried taking some allergy meds, but he hadn’t had any non-drowsy capsules and had woken up from an unintentional nap with Coulson curled up on his chest and a fluffy cat tail curled against the side of his face.

Coulson made a very fluffy cat. Extremely fluffy. If Jasper had ever given the matter much consideration, he would have expected Coulson to turn into one of those lean, mean-looking cats. Dark and slinky things that hung out on the streets and always had a little chunks missing from their ears and scars across their pointed noses and one judgemental eye squinting a little more than the other. That’s the kind of cat Jasper would have anticipated. A little hellcat with fur the dusty charcoal of a suit that has made it through some tense situations.

Coulson wasn’t like that at all. In terms of construction, he was much closer to a fuzzy marshmallow. He had a round, flat face with a mouth that looked tiny when it was closed and cavernous when he yawned. There was fluff, so much fluff, of the short and dense variety. And a big, squirrely tail. He was a white cat, with a brown splotch over one ear and a messy dribble of brown fur along his tail. Which, in all honesty, made a fair amount of sense. A white guy with brown hair and blue eyes had turned into a white cat with brown bits and blue eyes. 

And little Muppet feetses. 

And a pink little tongue that sometimes poked out of his mouth when he slept. 

And sometimes when he went to yowl a little “neep” sound came out instead. 

And, goddamnit, Jasper had seen a superior agent with one heck of a reputation... plonk his butt down on the coffee table and start licking his own balls. 

“We need to get you fixed,” Jasper said flatly, his words slurred a little by the allergy sniffles he was suffering through. He unable to tear his eyes away from the grooming. 

Coulson lifted his head up and narrowed his eyes at Jasper. The look would have been more intimidating if his little pink tongue wasn’t still poking out of his mouth.

“I meant ‘back to normal’ fixed,” Jasper clarified. “Not...” He lifted one hand up and made a snipping motion. One of Coulson’s ears went back, giving him a lopsided look of disapproval, and then he returned his attention to cleaning his bits. Jasper was slightly entranced by just how _loud_ a cat could be while licking its own genitals. In Coulson’s case, it was probably in part due to the smooshed little kitty face. Little gasps and grunts seemed to be the new norm. It wasn’t especially intimidating.

“Do you have to do that on the table?” Jasper asked. “You are such a brat.” Coulson’s tail swished in an annoyed fashion, and begrudgingly Jasper amended, “Such a brat, _sir_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This is what I imagine Coulson looks like.](http://gangsterpikachu.tumblr.com/post/20096644772/exotic-shorthair-cat)


End file.
